Most people have heard of Marie Curie, even if it is through the charitable organisation that has been set up with her name. Her studies and work have had an impact on patients’ lives across the world, as well as on the doctors, nurses and carers that work in Care Jobs Gloucester way that supports them.
Marie Curie was born in Poland and then lived her life in France, working as both a physicist and a chemist. She was instrumental in undertaking research into radioactivity and was the first woman to ever be awarded a Nobel Prize and went on to win a second Nobel Prize in a separate scientific discipline.
During the First World War, she helped to create mobile X-ray machines that could be used on the battlefields and in the mobile hospitals to help assess the patients that were brought in with a variety of injuries. She also developed a technique for sterilising infected tissue by using hollow needles containing radium. Over the course of the First World War, over a million soldiers were treated using either the mobile X-ray units or the radium needles.
Due to the amount of time that she spent around radium, she contracted a form of anaemia that eventually led to her death in July 1934. During her work, the dangers of radium and exposure to X-rays were not known, and we now have many safety measures in place for working with these items.
